Microsoft kicked off its Worldwide Partner Conference this morning by showing off Project GigJam, a new service supposedly years in the making that hopes to provide a whole new way for people to involve others in business tasks.
In a blog entry posted this morning, Microsoft notes there has been an unprecedented investment in technology to support business processes, including front-ends on the Web, SaaS offerings, and mobile. Yet, all of these approaches haven’t done much to cut down the time and manual effort working with others to accomplish tasks. GagJam looks to dramatically transform that process by allowing one to summon information, circle and cross out, and divvy it up between users regardless of how people connect (phone, face-to-face, etc). GigaJam breaks down tasks and information into discrete steps or sets. It ensures that no matter what, people have the tools and information they need and that all work is synchronized.†
“We turn every task in an application into a multi-person app, all at the speed of communication” said Vijay Mital, Microsoft General Manager of Ambient Computing and Robotics.
Under the covers, GigJam is a series of Azure services, a lightweight client, and a whole bunch of communication between services like Office 365, Azure, and other services.†”GigJam is doing something unprecedented,” said Mital. “It’s an entirely new system. It’s ultra-lightweight and follows standard protocols of HTTP, OAuth, REST, HTML/JavaScript, and more.”†
Microsoft today announced the new service will be in preview in the coming months. I encourage you to check out the post on the Microsoft blog for some real-world examples and a video.
Stay tuned to our hub for more from the 2015 WorldWide Partner Conference, and specific news coming out of Microsoft at the Worldwide Partner Conference Spotlight.
